She just turned 100. To celebrate, she’ll attempt 100 dances wearing heels and a mask.
Asked how she feels after having hit 100 years old on Sunday, Juanita Moss laughs.
“Just like I did when I was 99,” replies the woman known best as “Nita,” who celebrated her birthday last weekend with 11 members of her family at her home in The Cypress of Charlotte retirement community.
“The Lord has blessed me with a long life and no pain. No pain whatsoever. ... Well, except I have arthritis in one thumb — and I’m beginning to have arthritis of the brain,” she says, laughing again. “But I’m in excellent health as far as I know. Certainly better than most of my friends.”
On Tuesday, Moss proved just that during a two-hour dance practice at Providence Baptist Church in Charlotte, foxtrotting, tangoing, waltzing, rumbaing, sambaing, swinging and hustling with two-inch kitten heels on her feet and no-nonsense instructor John Glandon on her back.
And this Sunday — exactly one week after being freshly minted as a centenarian — the duo will be in Orlando, Fla., for an event that will put her fitness to a much more considerable test: Her goal is to participate in 100 dances over roughly 10 hours at World Promotions’ Ballroom Blitz, a dance competition at which she will be the oldest entrant by 13 years.
After that, Moss insists she plans to retire, just four years and eight competitions after she and Glandon started working together.
But it’s not the first time she has said that this will be her last dance...
‘I wish I had started younger’
Frankly, it’s not easy to write a story about Nita Moss.
She’ll share to a point, but over and over again she prefaces rich details about her life by laughing softly and saying something along the lines of “You don’t have to put this in the paper,” then tells a great story, then finishes it by laughing again and saying something along the lines of “But I don’t want to see that in the paper.”
At the end of the conversation, before a reporter can even ask if she might be willing to loosen up on certain things, she makes the reporter promise not to publish anything she didn’t want published — even though they’re totally innocent and innocuous stories about her life.
Perhaps it’s the modest, old-fashioned Southerner in her.
Anyway, here’s what she said we can say:
Moss was not a dancer, and in fact, was never interested in dance when she was younger. She was all business, quite literally.
“From grammar school on, every subject I studied had something to do with business,” she says.
She grew up in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., and attended now-defunct Crichton’s Business College in Atlanta, returning to live for a time in Florida with her husband Harry. They moved to Charlotte in 1952, and two years later opened a seasonal screen business called Moss Supply Company. (The company still exists today and is run by their son and grandchildren. Harry died about 10 years ago.)
“I wish I had started younger,” Nita Moss says of dancing. “But, you see, I’ve worked all my life. I sat at a desk all my life. ... So I didn’t have time for dancing. It would have been nice, but no, there was no time. No energy left over.”
Her first significant exposure to dance, then, came at The Cypress, which had hired a dance instructor to come in and lead group lessons to its residents twice a month. Moss enjoyed them and felt it was a less-monotonous form of exercise than going to the gym, so six years ago, at age 94, she hired the instructor to give her private lessons.
After two years with him, she wanted to try a new teacher, so she dropped in to inquire about private lessons at Queen City Ballroom, a studio in SouthPark a couple of miles from her home that she had driven past countless times. (Yes, she continued to drive herself around town just fine through her 90s.)
Initially she worked with one of their staff instructors, but before long she was linked up with a guy named John Glandon.
Though he lives in New York state, Glandon is co-owner of Capital Ballroom Dance Studio in Columbia, S.C., and he has trained staff at Queen City Ballroom (owned by his ex-wife Dana Glandon). So he was no stranger to the Carolinas.
He also was no stranger to dancing with women in their 90s.
The secrets to their success
When Glandon met Moss, he had already been partnered for nearly a decade with Betty Patterson of Columbia, then a 92-year-old breast cancer survivor he’d turned into a champion competitive ballroom dancer.
His secret to working with students their age? He says it’s for him to not get too worried about their age.
“I work them hard. As hard as I can,” says Glandon, who is 72. “They’ll keep saying, ‘Oh, I’m too old, I’m too old.’ I say, ‘Don’t give me that crap. That’s not gonna happen. OK? I’ll tell you when to sit at home and watch TV. But not right yet.’ So yeah, I’m as tough on them as I am on my 20-year-olds.”
That’s not entirely true. On Tuesday at Providence Baptist’s Mission Center, Glandon encourages Moss to sit down every couple of minutes to give her feet a break between each dance.
But the pace at which they work isn’t an easy one, either, and nearly two hours into Moss’s lesson Glandon is trying to make sure she’s both physically and mentally ready for the long day on Sunday — when she’ll be competing mostly against people in their 60s, 70s and early 80s.
“You have to be ready for any tempo,” he tells her, as they work on a swing dance. “If you get too fast, I can slow you up, but you gotta take it easy. The longer the day goes, the harder it’s going to be to focus. ... When you get tired, that’s when you’ll start to lose it. And that’ll be around 4 or 5 o’clock Sunday, when you go, ‘I don’t know who I am.’”
This won’t be a new experience for her, though. In July 2019, at age 99, Moss won a top participation award at World Promotions’ Viva Las Vegas competition in Nevada by completing 101 dances.
When asked to explain how this is possible for a woman her age, she quickly replies, “With John’s help, and with the help of the Lord.”
And here she shares a story that she doesn’t censor: “When my twin sister was born, they put her aside because they didn’t know a second baby was on the way, and I was told she turned blue. Well, she had weak lungs and at age 13-1/2 she died of pneumonia. If I had been born first, that would have been me.
“So I can’t explain why I was left here — unless it was to be an example to other people.”
‘It’s keeping me on my toes’
Moss is more than a little bit reminiscent of the late Harriette Thompson, who also lived at The Cypress and who became a hugely inspirational figure in Charlotte after becoming the oldest woman ever to complete a marathon (at age 92, in 2015).
But Moss gives her old friend a good-natured ribbing when a comparison is drawn.
“My dance partner said, ‘Well, all she had to remember was put one foot in front of the other,’” she says, chuckling. “I have to remember all of these steps and the routines and all the little fine points of what to do when. It’s a challenge. It’s really keeping me — oh, I don’t mean this to be a pun, but — it’s keeping me on my toes.”
Also keeping her on her toes, of course, has been COVID.
Pre-pandemic, she had planned on closing out her career at World Promotions’ North Carolina Classic at The Westin Charlotte in September. But after it was canceled due to statewide restrictions, Moss decided to finish with 100 dances the week after her 100th birthday at the Orlando event, which is able to happen because of Florida’s more relaxed policies.
She confesses to being “a little bit uneasy about the air travel,” and her family won’t be joining her due to virus concerns. Meanwhile, though masks aren’t required while competitors are dancing, both Moss and Glandon will be masked up the entire day on Sunday.
And then, after the Orlando event is over, she says it really will be all over for her as a competitive dancer.
“This is my last competition,” she says. “I’m retiring from dancing. ... I’ve been pushing myself so hard to do this, and I would like to spend more time at my home in Florida. I can’t do that if I have to be here every week to practice for another competition.
“He says now he has something lined up for when I’m 101, but no, I don’t think so. I’m not going to let him talk me into anything else,” she adds, laughing.
Glandon is laughing, too.
“Oh, she said that the last time,” he says. “After the first competition she said that. After the second competition, and the third, and the fourth. Like, this is our eighth competition. So I just say, ‘Yes, Nita. We’re never going again. I will never take you again, you’re right.’ Then she has two weeks rest and she’s ready to come back and take lessons — and she’s like, ‘Well, maybe I can do one more...’”
Observer visual journalist Jeff Siner contributed to this report.
